Milo didn’t know.
“That’s why,” he said, “when I go back this next time, I’m going to make sure I have what I need to get it right.”
Suzie’s face clouded.
“What does that mean, exactly?” she asked.
How to explain the idea that had crept up on him during their morning coffee?
“I’m not taking any chances next time,” he said. “I’m going to have special powers.”
Her eyes held a cautious interest.
He counted off on his fingers.
“One: I can choose to be smart if I want, right? Fine. I’m going to be really fucking smart.”
“That’s no guarantee.”
“Of course not, but”—Finger Two—“I can also choose to have unusual strengths and challenges. Like, you know, being clairvoyant, or reading auras, or irresistible personal charisma.”
“Which?”
“I haven’t made up my mind.” Finger Three. “I’m going to be born to smart parents, in a smart community. And I will use my abilities to do good.
“That’s as far as I’ve got,” he said. “But my last few lives, after consideration, I have been taking a knife to a gunfight. This time I will hit humanity like a bomb of goodness.”
Suzie put down her portion of the newspaper.
“I like it,” she said. “If you make it, maybe we really can be like this”—she indicated the couch, their coffee, a nearby brandy bottle, the sunlight, the shop—“all the time.”
The sunlight shifted just so, the way it only does in candle shops.
“So you’re going soon?” she said.
He nodded. “You know how it is. Once you get the itch, it just gets worse. It’s like the Universal Cosmic Eye telling you it’s time.”
Suzie got a peculiar look on her face.
“I do know,” she said. “I know exactly, in fact.”
She got up.
Milo squinted at her.
“Suzie? You’re puzzling me.”
But she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking up at the antique tin ceiling.
Not at it so much as through it. The way, Milo thought, you might look at the ceiling if you were getting ready to say something to the whole universe.
“I’m sorry, Milo,” she said. “I’m afraid this might be uncomfortable for you.”
Before Milo could phrase a question, she opened her mouth, and the room and the neighborhood and the universe itself turned inside out. The language of Everything That Was crammed itself into the candle shop’s back room full of photons and hurricanes and sweater vests and dung beetles and Thursday afternoons. Pyramids and bathtubs and award-winning barbecue sauces— Milo felt himself stretching like a rubber band.
It stopped.
The room quieted, leaving them both as they had been, standing in the back of the shop. Milo patted himself down, half-expecting a galaxy or Queen Victoria to fall out of his pants.
“You just quit,” he said, “didn’t you?”
Suzie nodded. She looked a little ashen.
“Are you okay?”
He crossed the floor and put his arms around her. Felt her forehead.
“I’m okay. I just surprised myself, is all.”
“All right.”
They stood that way for a while. Long enough for the shadows to lengthen.
He let her go. Turned to head for the bathroom.
“I need to give some more thought to my own Big Idea,” he said. “A life with advantages isn’t the same as a life with privileges, but there are still pitfalls. Similar pitfalls, really—”
“Milo?”
Suzie’s voice was suddenly small and frightened.
Turning, he found that the room behind him no longer existed.
It was as if the walls and floor and the space between them had stretched. As if a lens had interposed, with Suzie on the opposite side. She stood just as he had left her but at the same time not quite there, as if she stood around a corner.
She cried out, called his name.
He reached for her, but she was light-years away.
“What’s happening?” he cried, still reaching. But he knew.
Things were balancing, exactly as she had feared.
“I love you,” he said mournfully.
Tears left Suzie’s eyes and shot across the room like sideways rain.
She streamed away like water, flashing in the half-light. Gone.
Milo called after her. His voice stretched like the howl of a train, then snapped back to normal, along with everything else. He paused a second, looking around, sizing up what had happened. Then reason left him, drained out of him like a flood in reverse, and left him on all fours, screaming like a child.
—
“She’s not gone,” Nan told him for the third time, handing him his third Coke and vodka. “She’s somewhere, in some form. Somewhere.”
Milo sat at her kitchen table, shaking. He had come to the door a stuttering, crying, runny-nosed mess. He wanted his moms. All ninety-nine hundred of them.
“I saw her go,” he explained again.
“Nothing ‘goes,’?” said Nan. “Don’t you listen?”
“Bullshit. That whole thing with the sidewalk.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Dammit, Milo, drink your whatever-it-is and be quiet awhile. Wheel of Fortune’s on. And American Idol and Welcome Back, Kotter.”
They sat there in silence through Welcome Back, Kotter and a fresh bottle of vodka and six more shows in a row.
—
When Milo finally walked down to the river, a week later, it wasn’t because he’d worked it all out in his head and was healed and ready to begin a new life. His head and heart still felt like bomb craters.
That’s why he was at the river.
He didn’t want to think of it as a kind of suicide, but, hey, when you have loved a woman for eight thousand years and then the cosmic boa itself decides you can’t be together, it’s hard.
“Stupidest goddamn thing,” he muttered. Then he shut up. Everything he said, everything he thought, just dug the crater a little deeper.
He concentrated on the new life he had chosen. Looked for it in the water.
Advantages. Special abilities. Superpowers, even. He looked for them in the water as he waded through the mud and the reeds, looked among the reflections as the river flowed around his knees.
The images were not always what you expected, but you knew them when you saw them.
A goose. A tall man in professorial robes. University buildings, ivy and stone.
The river filled with pictures and reflections and pulled him down.
A river. Mist. An old stone bridge.
Nothing.
A roulette wheel doesn’t make choices.
There’s a cause: The wheel is spun.
There’s an effect: A ball pops around like an electrocuted cat and eventually comes to rest somewhere.
In much the same way, the cosmic boa doesn’t make choices. Causes go in one end, a passive balancing takes place, and effects come out the other end.
So you can’t blame the universe for the fact that Suzie, having spun her relationship with the universe as one might spin a roulette wheel, suddenly found herself wormholed out of her candle shop and materialized far, far away in the corner booth at Santana’s Taco Palace.
It happened so fast, and was so terrible and awful, that she sat there for three whole minutes with a numb expression on her face.